QUIPS AND CRANKS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 767, 12 November 1886, Page 6

QUIPS AND CRANKS.

TORTURES FOR THE CHINESE. Globe. A correspondent sends us the following. It purports to be a translation of a Chinese document picked up last year at the “Inventions.” It is dated from King-Sing-Tong in November, 1884, signed by a certain LyAh, and would appear to be part of an official report addressed to the Board of Punishments. Pekin :—After six moons’ sojourn in this abode of moistened gloom, I am prepared to offer some suggestions for improving our Celestial punishments. Those which we now.use, and which are shown in pictures at the exhibition of Madame Too So, require a good deal of apparatus, and can from their destructive tendency be inflicted only once upon the same criminal. The tortures in vogue here are, perhaps, the only points where these barbarians have improved on our civilisation. They are self-inflicted ; they may be repeated many times ; and they are always conducted with that rigid etiquette which is distinctive of a superior people. From patriotic motives I have even undergone many of these punishments myself, and I have arranged with some barbarian experts who will accompany me home and introduce their art into our peerless country, should the brother of the Sun and Moon be pleased so to ordain. The name common to these inflictions is Pah-Ti, and it is customary to refer to them as pleasant. The executioner at whose dwelling they occur writes to ask the victims for the pleasure of their company ; and they reply that they are happy to accept the kind invitation. The Pah-Ti’s are of various kinds. One form now almost obsolete is called the Tee-Pah-Ti or Hi Tee. It is usually applied to middle-aged ladies. They have to assemble and each swallow a portion of meat followed by tea-cake, muffin, or hot toast soaked in fat made from the milk of cows. Each then drinks large draughts of a decoction from those twiceboiled leaves which we disdainfully export to barbarians as tea. Ths tannin in it changes the meat into leather, and its fluid makes the tea-cake or other spongy substance expand. Thus present discomfort and future indigestion are ensured. Meanwhile the victims are compelled by etiquette to converse with assumed merriment, regardless of the increasing agony they are enduring. The greater criminals are made to sit during this operation with their backs to the fire ; and in very heinous cases the door or window is sufficiently opened to allow a draught free play over their faces. This adds toothache or neuralgia to their other inconveniences. These Tee-Pah-Ti’s, however, are falling into disuse. For they usually occurred iu the afternoon, whereby those who took part in them were prevented from earning income tax for the State. Nowadays most punishments take place in the evening. They are known as Pah-Ti’s or Swah Ray’s. The simplest of these is. like our admonition by baking. Into a room containing enough air for 100 persons, 400 persons are made to enter. Cas and candles are lighted ; the doors and windows are hermetically sealed ; and the prisoners are introduced one to another. Politeness compels them to converse. This, from drought and sympathy, they find most difficult, and each is a source of sorrow to himself and to all his neighbors. A way of varying this torture is to lower the temperature by means of draughts to a point at which conversation becomes just possible. All the most talkative people are then mutually introduced, and so soon as they evince a wish to speak they are ordered to be silent. Then executioners, with instruments or with their natural voices, produce such bangs, screeches and cries as strike terror into the boldest hearts, and make all present tremble to think what may be coming next. After these performances, those who have failed to escape from the neighborhood of the executioners are obliged to smile and thank them. For more robust criminals there is a severer punishment, known a 3 Dhan-Tsing. It .is more fatiguing than the treadmill, and its recipients are less comfortably attired. Those who assist in it are called Shap p’ Roons and Pah T’ners. The Pah T’ners have to clutch one another in uncomfortable positions, and gyrate violently to the sound of instruments. The Shah p’ Roons are placed bolt upright in cold, awkward places. They may not move, but they act like the cushions of a billiard-table, and have the Pah T’ners continually bumping against them, and stamping on their toes. Meanwhile, the Pah T’ners are very unhappy. For care is taken to couple the tall with the short, the slight with the stout, and the light with the unwieldy. So the short get jerked and bumped, the tall are cramped with stooping ; the slight cannot get a proper hold of the stout, and the stout feel hot and contemptuous towards the slight. The feather weights revolve helplessly around the unwieldly, and the unwieldly revolve like the earth upon their axes, and are cannoned against and hustled till they are black and blue. Then they all have to say how much they have enjoyed themselves ; they catch cold on the road home, and awake very sad indeed the next morning.